The words "concept album" have been dirty words in music circles for decades. Not since the Who's Tommy played his last game of blind pinball has a concept record sounded like a good idea to a record company - nor advisable for a band.

But Perth's Eskimo Joe would disagree. They had grand plans for their second record, A Song is a City - even a musical.

"This originally was going to be a kind of concept album," says singer, bassist and lyricist Kav Temperley. "I was thinking about it in terms of a musical, and A Song is a City was going to be the name of the musical."

If it sounds like the marketing kiss of death, consider Eskimo Joe's unpredictability. The trio, who formed in high school and won the 1997 National Campus Band Competition, scored a big record deal with EMI's offshoot Modular Recordings on the strength of novelty hits Sweater (1998) and Turn up Your Stereo ('99).

But they ditched the hit formula halfway through writing their debut album. Many were surprised by the grand palette of Girl when it finally came out in 2001.

"We deliberately completely reinvented ourselves, just so with this album and all the albums to come after this we wouldn't pigeonhole ourselves," Temperley says.

Joel Quartermain, the band's original drummer and now second guitarist, joins in: "When we started writing for this record, we were going to make a Lenny Kravitz album, like a sex-funk album." Laughter all round.

"Then we were going to make [U2's] Achtung Baby. Then we scrapped that, too."

There were other plans.

"We were going to do an album of duets at one point," says guitarist Stu MacLeod. "If Linda Ronstadt's reading, there's a little bit of country in there, a little bit of western."

But the setbacks were not all tooling around. In the three years since Girl's release, Eskimo Joe left Modular ("due to bad communication," Temperley says) and found a new home with Festival Mushroom.

Eventually, Quartermain says, they figured out what to do for the second album: "We decided to make an Eskimo Joe record."

Temperley: "[Our] debut was almost a concept album about girls. If so, then A Song is a City must be the concept record about breaking up with girls. I've broken up with my girlfriend now and that's what the album is about - our break-up, of course."

A layered, rich pop record, A Song is a City shares with its predecessor a sombre closing track about driving (Car Crash).

"Like I said, we're a big fan of concept albums," Quartermain says. "We like that whole romantic aspect of it: having the classic closing track and the classic opening track."

Temperley: "Good albums should have a storyline curve and an emotion curve."

But not like a rock opera, stresses Quartermain: "Just the idea of having a beginning a middle and an end."

There's a pause.

"Actually, what we were going to do was make a rock-opera album," MacLeod says.